Book Review : Humanity in a Hard and Lovely Land

The Girl From Cardigan: Sixteen Stories by Leslie Norris (Peregrine Smith Books: $15.95; 176 pages)

These 16 stories can be your magic carpet to a green and pleasant land, a place that hardly exists anymore except in memory. Set for the most part in Wales, in the recent past or in a present still happily lagging ours, they deal with private traditions and family relationships, with love and death, the search for connection and identity, with youthful idealism and mature reality.

In Norris’ hands, “deal with” implies a resolution of one sort or another--an opportunity seized, an intuition proven right or wrong, a misunderstanding settled. Something palpable always happens here, supplying the satisfying sense of completion that makes you remember characters, plot and setting, even though you’ve been involved but briefly.

The stories are short but so distinct and fully realized that they have the resonance of novels. When a Norris character seeks his roots, they’re actually there to be found. Take Rhodri Llewellyn in “The Holm Oak,” driving back to the family farm in Wales with his wife. He’s an emigre scientist, well tailored, well traveled, well rewarded by the American university where he teaches.

Ancient Evergreen

He’s inherited the house and land used by Llewellyns for 300 years, and though he knows he’ll never till the fields or sleep in the house for more than a few nights at a time, so far he hasn’t been able to part with the property. “The land fell away in a gentle slope and the far edge was hidden, but for the big oak. It was an evergreen oak, a holm oak, the only one, they had believed, in the county. The last of the sunlight was falling on its glossy leaves.” The childhood memories flood back, more at the sight of the tree than of the house.

An old friend and neighbor reminds Rhodri that he passes the house every day, regretfully watching it decay, when it could be sold to another family to be maintained and enjoyed. By the end of the story, standing under that ancient tree, Llewellyn makes his decision, even though a moment before, he’d answered “I don’t know” when his wife asked what he planned to do with the place.

Skills of Yesteryear

“A Piece of Archangel” begins with two old friends building a set of bookshelves, but quickly becomes a comparison between the days when boatloads of a seasoned, silvery Russian softwood from Archangel could appear in Wales to be worked by master craftsmen into beautiful and durable furniture, and the present. Now “anybody with a hammer and a couple of six-inch nails is a carpenter,” and braces, clamps and power tools take the place of skill, even in this relatively unspoiled corner of Wales.

“What’s gone is gone,” the builder says. “There’s no sense in wishing for things past. There’s no sense in hoping for things to come back”--neither the forests of Archangel, nor the easy relations between England and Russia, nor the appreciation of old-fashioned workmanship. A pragmatic person accepts those facts, accommodates, and takes pleasure in that which remains.

In “Gamblers,” the narrator tells of his boyhood adventures as a lookout for illegal gambling games of pitch and toss, played for pennies by young men hardly older than he was. In that short space, we’re given not only a complete documentary of life in a Welsh mining town during the Depression but a sad, sweet recollection of a man who was once the narrator’s hero.

“My Uncle’s Story” is an affectionate portrait of an alcoholic whose otherwise dissolute life was illuminated by rare moments of glory and joy. “Blackberries” is a tale of filial love, in which the father remains a giant to his son despite the mother’s anger and frustration at the family’s declining fortunes. By the end of five lyrical pages, “the child began to understand that they were different people; his father, his mother, himself, and that he must learn sometimes to be alone.”

Sense of Place

Succinct as they are, these stories are full of incident, personality and the intense sense of place missing in so much contemporary fiction. Here events take place not only in the mind and heart but in a precise external landscape; characters, no matter how quickly glimpsed, are caught at their most revealing moments. A deep, abiding and altogether unsentimental love for a hard and lovely country pervades the whole. Because Norris writes verse as well as prose, he’s able to compress the most complex ideas and emotions into the least amount of room; the images so carefully chosen that the spatial limits seem to expand far beyond the strict boundaries he’s set for himself.

Though unrelated by anything except geographical setting, the stories have an internal harmony that intensifies the impression they create individually. Unlike most short story collections, which tend to suffer from being read at a single sitting, “The Girl From Cardigan” can be enjoyed either all at once or piece by piece--the pleasure concentrated or rationed, but guaranteed.